sub-Roman Research Articles

Syrians in Post-Roman Britain: an Interdisciplinary Survey

The author reviews literature from various fields of archaeology, history, and linguistics, trying to gather scattered information about contacts between Post-Roman Britain and late Roman Syria. Archaeology shows that a significant part of all imports to Britain in the 5th-7th centuries came from Byzantium and arrived on the Island in Syrian/ Cilician amphorae (both regions were closely intertwined economically, culturally and religiously). Based on these findings and numerous written sources, historians conclude that Syrian merchants played a leading role in trade between Byzantium and Britain. Isotopic studies of the Post-Roman burials in Wales confirm the presence of migrants from the eastern Mediterranean on the island. Linguistic studies of British manuscripts testify to their live contacts with the Byzantines — and specifically the Syrians. This consistent evidence of the long-term presence of Syrians in post-Roman Britain makes it possible to speak with confidence about cultural contacts between Christians of Britain and the Antiochian Church.

Helping to shine light on the Dark Ages: Applying the bioarchaeology of care approach to remains from the early Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Worthy Park

ObjectiveTo test the hypothesis that a bioarchaeological focus on health-related care provision can contribute to the currently limited understanding of social practice in Early Anglo-Saxon England (mid5th-early7th centuries AD). MaterialsPublished descriptions of pathology in 69 adult remains from the Early Anglo-Saxon cemetery of Worthy Park, southern England. MethodsThree case studies (one examining likely need for care at an individual level and two at a population level) were undertaken using the bioarchaeology of care approach. ResultsAnalyses indicate likely care provision (‘direct support’ and/or ‘accommodation of difference’) to Worthy Park individuals experiencing temporary or permanent disability. Interpretation suggests community interdependence, cooperation, flexibility and tolerance of difference, as well as cultural and socioeconomic mechanisms for managing physical and social challenges of ageing. ConclusionsThis study provides proof of concept that bioarchaeology of care analysis can offer new insights into social practice in this period. SignificanceThis study demonstrates that a bioarchaeological focus on caregiving behaviours in an Early Anglo-Saxon community extends modern thinking about social relations in post-Roman Britain, offering a model for future investigations into social practice in this, and potentially other, periods. More generally, it illustrates the richness of results achievable when combining bioarchaeological and historical research. LimitationsReliance on secondary sources limited detail (and potentially accuracy) of interpretation possible. Suggestions for further researchThis study’s approach should be further tested and refined, either through application to different Anglo-Saxon (or other historic) populations or in a more thorough analysis of the Worthy Park sample itself.

Archaeology and History: A Late Antiquity for Britain

Archaeology and History: A Late Antiquity for Britain

The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300–525 CE, by Robin Fleming

An arresting observation introduces Robin Fleming’s fascinating study of the ending of Roman Britain: ‘No other period in Britain’s prehistory or history witnessed the loss of so many classes of once-common objects, and these disappearances triggered fundamental changes in the structures of everyday life’ (p. 6). Of course, the visible material and social differences between Roman and post-Roman Britain have attracted a lot of previous attention. What marks out this original study is its focus, not on the causes of the ending of Roman Britain, or why quotidian objects disappeared, but on how they were used and what implications the disappearances had. Indeed, the model for how Roman Britain worked, and why it ended, may be familiar. In line with influential structural analyses, the Roman tax state is seen as the key to economic, social and material complexity, and its unravelling. Chapter One—‘The World the Annona Made’—presents a stylish, up-to-date overview of how the tax system produced that complexity, developed directly from the evidence, and a summary of the idea of ‘systems collapse’ in the fourth and fifth centuries. What Robin Fleming does is take up where this model leaves off, identifying how the objects that disappeared were bound up with social relationships and practices, and confronting the challenges their disappearances posed.

Tony Sullivan, The Battles of King Arthur. Barnsley and Havertown: Pen & Sword Military. 2022, xvii, 270 pp.

Abstract Attractively presented, The Battles of King Arthur should have been a success. It has a comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography; it is systematic, with eight well-marshalled chapters (Roman Britain; Post-Roman Britain; the Saxon invasion; dating; political change; warfare; Arthur’s Twelve Battles; other locations; conclusions). The author also (rightly) thinks Arthur was “indeed a historical figure” (p. ix). So, what went wrong? Why is the book a lesson on how not to approach the subject?

An Anglian Alliance: Place-Name Tracing the Iclingas and Wicingas

Abstract This paper describes the close relationship between two obscure tribal groups, the Iclingas and the Wicingas. Starting on the Continent in Angeln and crossing over to East Anglia by different routes, they migrated across post-Roman Britain to the Western Midlands, where they provided mutual support in establishing the medieval kingdoms of Mercia and Hwiccia. Based upon the tracing of place-names and the mapping of settlements along historical migration routes, this research incorporates several disciplines, including medieval history, migration studies, and onomastics. The paper also makes use of innovative techniques, such as Micro-level Tracing and Contact Tracing, as well as modern tools, such as the Mathematical Theory of Games, and Google Maps, to describe the unexpected alliance between these two Anglian kinship groups, thereby adding significant information to the notoriously opaque history of Britain in the sixth century.

Runes, ogham and Latin scripts: transition between orality and literacy in post-Roman Britain

Runic and ogham scrips are an important part of the heritage of the British Isles. While it is difficult to determine exactly where and when they were invented, and the contemporary consensus on this issue leaves many questions open, the importance of these writing systems in the oral-literate transition cannot be called into question. For these reasons, the following study has two aims. Firstly, it attempts to familiarise the reader with the historical background to the process of transition from orality to literacy. Secondly, it tries to allocate runes, ogham and Latin scripts within an anthropological perspective.

Hillforts and Power in the British Post-Roman West: A GIS Analysis of Dinas Powys

The (re)occupation of hillforts was a distinctive feature of post-Roman Europe in the fifth to seventh centuriesad. In western and northern Britain, hillforts are interpreted as power centres associated with militarized elites, but research has paid less attention to their landscape context, hence we know little about the factors that influenced their siting and how this facilitated elite power. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide opportunities for landscape research, but are constrained by limitations of source data and the difficulty of defining appropriate parameters for analysis. This article presents a new methodology that combines data processing and analytical functions in GIS with techniques and principles drawn from ‘traditional’ landscape archaeology. A case study, focused on Dinas Powys, suggests that the strategic siting of this hillfort facilitated control over the landscape and has wider implications for our understanding of patterns of power in post-Roman Britain.

The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature. Edited by Geraint Evans and Helen Fulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xxix+825.

<i>The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature</i>. Edited by Geraint Evans and Helen Fulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xxix+825.

Historia Brittonum and 'Saxon Annals': A case for convergence in the historiography of post-roman Britain

Analysis here of chapter 66 of 'Historia Brittonum' suggests that its chronology diverges less from that of Bede and 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' than previously believed. The author's own testimony demonstrates that he misunderstood the significance of Roman consuls. His belief that consuls, and not emperors, ruled Rome after 388 led him to delete twentyfour years from the reign of Valentinian III. This in turn shifted every date in chapter 66 back some two decades. But when this single error is corrected, 'Historia Brittonum's' chronology becomes much more consistent with that of other works of early Insular historiography. Most significant, this apparent convergence mandates a comprehensive re-examination of all the early written sources for post-Roman British history.

The Sources and Contributors of the Northern Memorandum and its Heirs

From the moment the first scholars tried to understand the events of Britain during the fifth and early sixth centuries, two British historical documents have been central to their efforts, the Historia Brittonum and the Annales Cambriae, both of which contained entries from a non-extant but generally accepted common source — the Northern Memorandum. Logically, learning as much as possible about the exact nature of that source would be of great use in better understanding post-Roman Britain. To begin rectifying the situation this article will review what is known about the background of the Northern Memorandum, Historia Brittonum, and Annales Cambriae. It will then explore the Historia Brittonum’s chapters and revisions and do the same with the Annales Cambriae entries up until the last northern British note. In each case the individual source(s), motivations, and date-range will be discussed. This exercise will be followed by a short discussion of the findings and one hopes a better understanding of both the Northern Memorandum and its derivatives.

Leisure, Popular Culture and Memory: The Invention of Dark Age Britain, Wales, England, and Middle-Earth in the Songs of Led Zeppelin

In the period of high modernity, and in the process of establishing the imperial nation-state of Great Britain, historians, archaeologists and enthusiastic amateurs searched high and low for material evidence and primary sources from what was called the Dark Ages. There is a gap in knowledge about this past, and all discussion rests on finding meaning in fading inscriptions, or dark earth, or trusting completely the writings of Bede and Gildas. The search for an identity and history for the nation for Great Britain was based on nationalist beliefs about Englishness, Britishness or Welshness. In the twentieth-century, the problem of Englishness, place and myth led Tolkien to write his Middle-earth stories in his leisure time. At the same time, the problem of Welshness or Britishness saw a growth in interest – in film and books - in Arthurian traditions, and a tourist interest in the Celtic fringe of Britain. In this paper, I show how the songs and album covers of Led Zeppelin, and their film The Song Remains the Same, draw upon both the work of Tolkien and the Arthurian traditions to construct ideas of masculine belonging in some mythological medieval time and place. While this constriction is idiosyncratic to the artists, they are drawing on and justifying the wider problem of England, Wales and Britain in leisure and culture.

Lineage, genealogy and landscape: a high-resolution archaeological model for the emergence of supra-local society from early medieval England

ABSTRACTThis paper considers the socio-political implications of a series of closely spatially and temporally related early medieval cemeteries from England and how they might be read as charting the emergence of both individual communities and of collective supra-local society. The case study is from early post-Roman Britain in a region that during the sixth century AD became the historically documented Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent. Four distinct communities appropriated an earlier burial landscape, arguably by a process of negotiation, reflecting the formation of a small-scale, supra-local society based around a site of occasional gathering. A key notion is that periodic gathering and local stability could be core features of large-scale polity formation. Overall, a case is made for the long-term cohesion of a local territory, reliant on an ancient mode of social organization.

AD 410: The History and Archaeology of Late and Post-Roman Britain. Edited by F.K. Haarer with R. Collins , K. Fitzpatrick-Matthews , S. Moorhead , D. Petts and P. Walton . Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, London, 2014. Pp. viii + 228, illus. Price: £36.00. isbn 978 0 907764 40 3.

AD 410: The History and Archaeology of Late and Post-Roman Britain. Edited by F.K. Haarer with R. Collins , K. Fitzpatrick-Matthews , S. Moorhead , D. Petts and P. Walton . Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, London, 2014. Pp. viii + 228, illus. Price: £36.00. <scp>isbn</scp> 978 0 907764 40 3.

Droit irlandais et droit gallois dans le contexte européen

This paper traces the relationship of the Roman Empire with Ireland and Wales from roughly the fifth to the seventh centuries and probes the role that Roman and Canon law played there following the events of 410, based on evidence from authors, such as Prosper of Aquitaine, Venantius Fortunatus, Zosimus and Gildas, as well as the vernacular legal traditions. This approach allows us to investigate perceptions of legal identity in Post-Roman Britain and the echoes of Latin learning embraced in Ireland.

King Arthur’s European Realm: New Evidence from Monmouth’s Primary Sources by Paul Sire

Paul Sire, King Arthur's European Realm: New Evidence from Monmouth's Primary Sources. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2014. Pp. 212. ISBN: 978-0-78647801-9. $35.Five hundred years ago, the humanist scholar Polydore Vergil radically altered the long-standing medieval historiographical assumption, deriving primarily from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, that King Arthur had embarked on a series of conquests that had netted him a European empire that rivaled, if not surpassed, Charlemagne's. Vergil pointed out that there were absolutely no contemporary continental sources that could verify the existence of this Arthur or his empire; in fact, much of the historical record as it has come down to us would make such a series of conquests impossible. Since the sixteenth century, many a man of letters-taking offense at Vergil's decisive dismantling of any historical basis for the Arthurian legend-have taken to various forms of special pleading. In early modern England, poets like Michael Drayton and Edmund Spenser chose simply (and perhaps wisely) to ignore Polydore Vergil's historiographical intervention entirely, while antiquarians like John Leland rushed rather desperately to Geoffrey of Monmouth's defense. Although there have been a few responsible scholars since then who have sought plausible prototypes for King Arthur in Dark Age Britain (John Morris and Geoffrey Ashe spring to mind), there have also been many studies that attempt to resuscitate wholesale a fully actualized King Arthur that would fly in the face of Polydore Vergil and, indeed, of the preponderance of all the historical evidence. Paul Sire in his book King Arthur's European Realm: New Evidence from Monmouth's Primary Sources makes just such an argument.Despite its subtitle, this book does very little analysis of Geoffrey of Monmouth's actual known primary sources (mainly Bede, Gildas, and pseudo-Nennius), and does not offer anything approaching real evidence for any hitherto-unknown primary source. Instead, the book dangles the endlessly deferred term 'primary source' as a way to grant itself an authority it cannot have. In fact, Sire's most heavily consulted source for the intricate politics of Dark Age Europe is in fact Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And although he does occasionally cite a few other primary sources-chiefly early Scottish chronicles and the early Irish Expulsion of the Deisi-he never demonstrates that these were actually known sources for Geoffrey of Monmouth. Sire's use of other types of evidence is equally problematic. For instance, he treats the patently fictional tale told of the Roman emperor Magnus Maximus as it appears in the twelfth-century Welsh Breuddwyt Maxen as historical fact. Throughout the book, he weaves treacherously between topography, hagiography, and prosopography, as well as from the often unreliable speculations on early medieval genealogy by Christian Settipani and from modern historical genetics in the popularizing vein of Stephen Oppenheimer's The Origins of the British. …

Notes and Considerations on the Importance of St. Patrick's Epistola Ad Milites Corotici as a Source on the Origins of Celtic Christinanity and Sub-Roman Britain

The purpose of this tripartite paper is to demonstrate the unique and exceptional value of the Epistola ad milites Corotici as a direct source for the historical reconstruction of the origins of the Celtic insular Church in the early years of so-called Sub-Roman Britain. Patrick’s letter, as I will try to show, contains information which is not otherwise available on these crucial years. Moreover —and on occasions in comparison with the Confessio—the value of the Epistola in relation to these events has increased. The themes and historical figures discussed in the Epistola have proved to be fundamental to an understanding of the historical, social and religious causes both of the end of Roman power in Britain and the sudden rise of the apostolic missions especially in Ireland and in the rest of the Post-Roman Britain, as well as in less Romanised areas as a result of Nynias’s and Columba’s preaching and by means of the definitive action of the Roman Church in sending Augustine of Canterbury to Britain.

Object Biography, Re-use and Recycling in the Late to Post-Roman Transition Period and Beyond: Rings made from Romano-British Bracelets

AbstractDocumenting a phenomenon that has previously been overlooked, this article examines the later stages of object biography in relation to Romano-British bracelets, namely, their modification and subsequent re-use as smaller rings. Re-use is shown to occur widely and is particularly associated with the late fourth to early fifth centuriesa.d., with cut-down bracelets also found in early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries. The making of smaller rings from late Roman bracelets is demonstrated to be part of a wider phenomenon of re-use, repair and recycling at the end of the Roman period in Britain, with attendant implications of cultural and economic change. It is proposed that the transformation of these artefacts was accompanied by changes in meaning which undermine the apparent continuity that is seen in the extended lifespan of the original object. This in turn illuminates the way that wider cultural norms were gradually eroded in the fifth century. Through the study of these artefacts a new perspective is provided on the transition to post-Roman Britain and the relationship between this and the early Anglo-Saxon period.

Integration Versus Apartheid in Post-Roman Britain: A Response to Thomas et al. (2008)

The genetic surveys of the population of Britain conducted by Weale et al. and Capelli et al. produced estimates of the Germani immigration into Britain during the early Anglo-Saxon period, c.430–c.730. These estimates are considerably higher than the estimates of archaeologists. A possible explanation suggests that an apartheid-like social system existed in the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms resulting in the Germani breeding more quickly than the Britons. Thomas et al. attempted to model this suggestion and showed that it was a possible explanation if all Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had such a system for up to 400 years. I noted that their explanation ignored the probability that Germani have been arriving in Britain for at least the past three millennia, including Belgae and Roman soldiers, and not only during the early Anglo-Saxon period. I produced a population model for Britain taking into account this long term, low level migration that showed that the estimates could be reconciled without the need for introducing an apartheid-like system. In turn, Thomas et al. responded, criticizing my model and arguments, which they considered persuasively written but wanting in terms of methodology, data sources, underlying assumptions, and application. Here, I respond in detail to those criticisms and argue that it is still unnecessary to introduce an apartheid-like system in order to reconcile the different estimates of Germani arrivals. A point of confusion is that geneticists are interested in ancestry, while archaeologists are interested in ethnicity: it is the bones, not the burial rites, which are important in the present context.

Integration Versus Apartheid in Post-Roman Britain: A Response to Thomas et al. (2008)

The genetic surveys of the population of Britain conducted by Weale et al. and Capelli et al. produced estimates of the Germani immigration into Britain during the early Anglo-Saxon period, c.430-c.730. These estimates are considerably higher than the estimates of archaeologists. A possible explanation suggests that an apartheid-like social system existed in the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms resulting in the Germani breeding more quickly than the Britons. Thomas et al. attempted to model this suggestion and showed that it was a possible explanation if all Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had such a system for up to 400 years. I noted that their explanation ignored the probability that Germani have been arriving in Britain for at least the past three millennia, including Belgae and Roman soldiers, and not only during the early Anglo-Saxon period. I produced a population model for Britain taking into account this long term, low level migration that showed that the estimates could be reconciled without the need for introducing an apartheid-like system. In turn, Thomas et al. responded, criticizing my model and arguments, which they considered persuasively written but wanting in terms of methodology, data sources, underlying assumptions, and application. Here, I respond in detail to those criticisms and argue that it is still unnecessary to introduce an apartheid-like system in order to reconcile the different estimates of Germani arrivals. A point of confusion is that geneticists are interested in ancestry, while archaeologists are interested in ethnicity: it is the bones, not the burial rites, which are important in the present context.